Catching Up December: First Snow 12/02

So, here is my plan of attack for catching up the blog... First, I am going to catch up December, then November while trying to stay current on documenting my family's life and my thoughts and feelings. If I hadn't seen the complete value of documenting things for us via my blog over the last few weeks as we would say, "When did this or that happen?... Go look at Mom's blog and see.", I might just skip catching it up all together, but really... we have come to count on this form of documentation for our family history, and I kind of like that.

So... here we go.

On December 2, we were just getting back into the swing of school after Thanksgiving break, and unexpectedly we woke up to snow on the ground! Corey and I woke Cooper because we didn't know if he would remember ever having seen snow before and knew that he would be excited by it, but we let the older kids sleep. When they woke up, they were more excited about the snow than I had imagined they would be, and everyone instantly started putting on layers of their non-snowproof clothes and heading outside. Yes, they looked very much like little Texans... and the the snow looked quite Texasy as well. It hardly covered the ground, but the kids scooped up all that they could and had snowball fights until there was literally no snow left. We delayed our always-busy Wednesday homeschool day for the very important activity of family-bonding and snow-playing.

On that day, I vividly remember thinking about how thankful I am that I get to homeschool my kids and that they have the opportunity to occasionally drop everything and do things like play in the snow. The fact that the older two kids - 13 and 9 - could be home to play with their 4 year old little brother was not taken for granted by me on that day. In many other situations, kids with that age difference might not have many opportunities to play together, and I am thankful that God has blessed us all with the chance to make that happen at this point in the kids' lives.

And after all of their snow-playing, the kids came in, and we all had hot chocolate, listened to Christmas music, and enjoyed the newly decorated living room before we got to work doing their schoolwork. It was a good day!